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ARM's Cortex-A72 and Mali-T880 GPU Announced For 2016 Flagship Smartphones
MojoKid writes ARM's Cortex-A57 is just now starting to break stride with design wins and full-ramp production in new mobile products. However, ARM is releasing a wealth of information on its successor: the Cortex-A72. ARM is targeting a core clock of 2.5GHz for the Cortex-A72 and it will be built using a 14nm/16nm FinFET+ process. Using the Cortex-A15 (NVIDIA Tegra 4, Tegra K1) as a baseline, ARM says that the Cortex-A57 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 810, Samsung Exynos 5433) offers 1.9x the performance. Stepping up to the Cortex-A72, which will begin shipping in next year's flagship smartphones, offers 3.5x the baseline performance of the Cortex-A15. These performance increases are being made within the same power envelope across all three architectures. So in turn, the Cortex-A72 can perform the same workload as the Cortex-A15 while consuming 75 percent less power. Much like the Snapdragon 810, which uses a big.LITTLE configuration (four low-power Cortex-A53 cores paired with four high performance Cortex-A57 cores), future SoCs using the Cortex-A72 will also be capable of big.LITTLE pairings with the Cortex-A53. ARM has also announced its new Mali-T880 GPU, which offers 1.8x the performance of the current generation Mali-T760. Under identical workloads, the Mali-T880 offers a 40 percent reduction in power consumption compared to its predecessor. ARM again also points to optimizations in the Mali-T880 to efficiently support 4K video playback.
Android holding ARM back.
They have desktop class processors held back by an OS that won't run multiple apps on a screen at once (well without Samsungs extensions it won't). Meanwhile the head of Android is focusing on Chrome at the expense of Android. As if a Chrome wrapper for Android to let it do multiple windows is somehow acceptable!
Its' ridiculous that ARM chips drive > 4K screens and yet Android has the calculator full screen.
And while people and business expect their desktop PCs to be professional and private, Google has made Android into a nasty piece of user tracking spyware thanks to their core ad business.
It's a pity Microsoft invested in Cyanogenmod because that would be the obvious fresh Android candidate to get multiple windows and privacy, the two big weaknesses of Android, to compete in the desktop market. Now with Microsoft's money they are unlikely to tackle the desktop.
What we need is a fork of Android with privacy controls put in and a new design of multiple windows to cope with touch instead of mouse. So no more fiddly maximize buttons, and old WIMP controls, but support for multiple windows.